HOW TO LEARN FROM POETS WITHOUT READING THEM
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

A former colleague of mine who taught philosophy at a community college insisted every semester that his students read an anthology of poetry. He really didn't have an interest in rhyme, meter or any of the traditional elements associated with poetry; he simply wanted his students to glean the ideas that poets tackle in their wrestling with words.

I've often thought that every journalism school should have at least one course in the writing of poetry. A student who grapples with enjambment and end-stopped lines is going to have a rich understanding of writing headlines without bad breaks and of the struggle to find the best, most economical way of saying things in the tight specifications of a headline. Every copy editor should study poetry.

Of course, I've known many journalists -- and lots of other highly educated people, some of them my closest friends -- who disdain poetry, believing it to be too esoteric or too strange for understanding.

I recently heard a young deacon at church confess that poetry was not her particular favorite genre of writing.

Only courtesy kept me from later asking her whether she appreciated the Psalms and many of the Prophets. Her extended study of Christian theology no doubt had exposed her, perhaps unwittingly, to some of the greatest poetry ever written. By all means, every priest should study poetry.

(I would heartily recommend to her or any other cleric who disdains poetry Robert Alter's wonderful 1987 book, The Art of Biblical Poetry.)

I'm digressing, however, from my thesis: One can learn from poets without reading their poetry.

"I keep a journal when my brain is killing me," wrote Marvin Bell, a long-time Iowa Workshop poet. Bell refers to his journal-keeping as "writing that spills over."

I've recently been gleaning gems of wisdom from the notebooks of poets. For the record, I'm working with two books: The Poet's Notebook, a 1995 collection of excerpts from the notebooks of 26 American poets collected by three New York poets and teachers (the book in which Bell's notes are recorded), and The Hand of the Poet, a 1997 book from the New York Public Library that is really a study of great poetry in manuscript form, most of it handwritten.

The manuscript book is one of those "coffee table" tomes that one usually reads when forced to visit a stranger's home, something to stimulate conversation. One doesn't fully read The Hand of the Poet; one studies the photos to probe for understanding of the toil some great poets have had in doing battle with a blank piece of paper.

It's in The Poet's Notebook, though, that I've learned much without reading a single poem.

New Jersey poet Steven Dunn writes in his notebook, "The problem with most nature poetry is that it doesn't sufficiently acknowledge Nature's ugliness and perversity." Such words surely resonate with anyone who has lived through a severe earthquake, a terrorizing tornado or a horrible hurricane.

Dunn's sensitive wisdom also comes out in this excerpt: "Self-interest, if not basic decency, should convince men that a fair-minded feminism is also their liberation."

In her notes, Rita Dove credits her daughter with the insight, "Everyone was inside someone else once."

And one of my favorite contemporary poets, Donald Hall, contends that "Eighty percent of human endeavor exists in order to prove that we are better than somebody else."

From the notes of Mary Oliver, another contemporary poet I've come to appreciate, I gleaned one of those odd truths that only a poet can teach: "Who would tell the mockingbird his song is frivolous, since it lacks words?"

Being a print journalist, I select my favorite note of a poet from James Merrill, who observed, "The various commentators on TV, lest their rating drop, vie with one another: how best to sensationalize today's disaster? ... Let's have these media people tested, like athletes, and expelled from the club if the rhetorical steroids in their urine rise above a certain level."

Yugoslavian immigrant and New Hampshire poet Charles Simic offers this contrast: "The highest levels of consciousness are wordless and its lowest gabby."

I'll take poetry any day over chat.

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net